November 6 ...

In 1854 John Philip Sousa was born in Washington, DC. In 1860 Abraham Lincoln defeated Democrat Stephen Douglas and two other candidates for the presidency. In 1861 Jefferson Davis was elected to a six-year term as president of the Confederacy. In 1869 the first college football game was played, as Rutgers beat Princeton, 6-4. In 1888 Benjamin Harrison won the presidential election, defeating incumbent Grover Cleveland with enough electoral votes, even though Cleveland led in the popular vote. In 1893 composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky died in St. Petersburg, Russia, at age 53. In 1900 President McKinley was re-elected, beating Democrat William Jennings Bryan. In 1906 Republican Charles Evans Hughes was elected governor of New York, defeating newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. In 1928 in a first, the results of Herbert Hoover's election victory over Alfred E. Smith were flashed onto an electric sign outside the New York Times building. In 1956 President Eisenhower won re-election, defeating Democrat Adlai E. Stevenson. In 1976 Benjamin L. Hooks was chosen to be the new executive director of the NAACP, succeeding Roy Wilkins. In 2004 the designers of SpaceShipOne, the first privately manned rocket to burst into space, were handed a $10 million check and the Ansari X Prize trophy.